Everyone's talking about the incoming Republican majority in the House of Representatives, but we shouldn't forget the 17 newly elected reformist GOP governors—from New Mexico to Ohio to Maine—who are nearly all hostile to the overweening ambitions of the federal government. Florida's Rick Scott may emerge as one of the boldest.

As far as Washington goes, he says there's been "enough spending and borrowing." And as far as relations between the nation's capital and the states are concerned, his mantra is even more blunt: "Give us our power back. Give us our money and let us run our states."

Mr. Scott, who over the past quarter-century built a $20 billion hospital empire, Columbia-HCA, has practically zero political experience.

[...]

"I'm going to run this state like a business," Mr. Scott promises. "When businesses think of locating in North America, I want to make sure that they think first about Florida."

[...]

Mr. Scott is unquestionably an expert on health-care issues, but he has come under intense attack for $1.6 billion in fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid claims submitted in the mid-1990s by Columbia Hospital Corporation, the name of Mr. Scott's firm at the time. Mr. Scott persuaded voters that he wasn't personally to blame, but those complaints will doubtless surface again as he tries to uproot the current health-care financing structure in the state.

Now, keep in mind that Michele Rhee and Chris Christie and Chris Cerf and all the other 'formers want to use Value-Added Modeling (VAM) to rate teachers and either give bonuses and rescind tenure based on those ratings.

Looking at the graph above, let's imagine what happens the day a principal announces the class lists for next year's fifth grade. Do you think that teachers might be looking at last names, trying to figure out ethnicity? Do you think they may put pressure on the principal to do some horse trading?

We're going to turn class assignments into the equivalent of fantasy baseball leagues. And this will be good for the kids...

I'm adding Tino Sanandaji to the blogroll, hoping he continues doing work like this:

I am going to rely on time survey data to give us hints about PISA test-scores. PISA is taken only by those aged 15-year, but let's examine all kids aged 15-18, both to increase the sample size and because high-school is more important. I will only include 15-18 year olds who are enrolled full time in high-school.I think the graph and the implications for educational outcomes are pretty self-explanatory, even though I will admit that I was (again) surprised by just how large the differences are.The only thing I would like to caution is not to assume a 1-1 causal relationship between input and output: kids who are better at school anyway may also study more, getting a double-advantage so to speak.This graph is worth keeping in mind next time you read that the Asian school system rather than Asian culture explains Asian educational outcomes. These are Asian-Americans under (largely) the same American public school system that the media has decided is the cause of Americas problems. With American teachers, American teacher unions, with typical American levels of education funding, and facing the same American lack of school choice. [emphasis mine]

I see this and I feel both vindicated as a teacher and incredibly saddened at the same time. When are we going to get serious about giving everyone in this country a chance to succeed? When are we going to stop pretending that charter schools and vouchers will have any effect on the massive income inequity and racial discrimination that has kept generation after generation of kids from realizing their potentials?

When are we going to stop letting charlatans like Michele Rhee guide our thinking about the future of these precious kids?

We now have a "reform" movement in education that is predicated on proving that American schools are failing miserably. Moaning abut the horrible test scores of America kids compared to the rest of the world's students has become a necessary requirement for the 'former who wants to look "serious".

The problem is that the 'formers are either knowingly misrepresenting these test results, or don't know how to read them correctly. And the media, which has shown over and over again that it can't do even the most basic analysis, is playing along.

So similar to my comparison of GDP levels, let us compare Americans with European ancestry (about 65% of the U.S population, and not some sort of elite) with Europeans in Europe. We remove Asians, Mexicans, African-Americans and other countries that are best compared to their home nations. In Europe, we remove immigrants.
The results are astonishing at least to me. Rather than being at the bottom of the class, United States students are 7th best out of 28, and far better than the average of Western European nations where they largely originate from. The mean score of Americans with European ancestry is524, compared to506in Europe, when first and second generation immigrants are excluded. So much for the bigoted notions that Americans are dumb and Europeans are smart. This is also opposed to everything I have been taught about the American public school system.

Read the entire thing - it's well worth it. I do, however, have to respond to this:

Similarly, the left claims that the American education system is horrible, because Americans don’t invest enough in education. The left has no answer when you point out that the United States spends insanely more than Europe and East Asia on education. According to theOECD, the United States spends about 50% more per pupil than the average for Western Europe, and 40% more than Japan.

I have an answer: a large part of that expenditure in the US includes providing health care and retirement benefits to teachers and other public school workers. But in every other OECD country, those expenses are provided to all citizens nationally. So the US has to report those expenses on human welfare as part of its education spending, while other countries do not. That makes a huge difference.

I am still waiting for some academic to do a comparison on spending that takes this into account. Tino, have you started on you dissertation yet?

I've been working on a post pretty much all week that I really want to get right, as it's a very important story. But it's complicated, and no one (as far as I've seen) in the media or the blogosphere has covered it; that makes finding a coherent point of view a little trickier.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I've never had to comb through so many sources before to understand a story. And I want to thoroughly document those sources; not only to be clear, but to issue a challenge to the media and the legislature to follow up on what I'm reporting.

So I ask your patience until late Sunday night, when I'll publish the thing, even if it's not fully polished.

Sorry to be cryptic, but I have to give myself a deadline, and, again, I think this is a really important story that needs to be told soon. Until then, blogging on other topics continues.

We pretty much know how he's going to respond come Monday: someone else's fault, nothing I could do anyway, not that big a deal, quit whining, etc. The real question is whether the press lets him get away with it.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Arnold Schwarzenegger is packing up his office in the Capitol and finally, after 7 long years, leaving his post as governor of California. It comes not a moment too soon, as he has distinguished himself as the worst governor in California history by quite a wide margin. The Sacramento Bee's readers agreed there was one word that encapsulated his misrule:failure.

George Skelton has recognized that the recall of Governor Gray Davis in the fall of 2003, which brought Schwarzenegger to office, was a colossal mistake. John Myers of KQED offered a more in-depth assessment of Arnold's signature failure, his inability to fix the state's budget mess. And he leaves office with approval ratings at record lows - at or below the numbers Gray Davis had when he was recalled.

I'm so old I remember when the Governator was going to save the golden coast - at least, that's what the teevee said.

In the same way, Christie is the flavor of the month - and it's the 30th...

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

In its first two years of operation, the Newark Charter School Fund spent more on consultants and internal compensation than it gave in grants to local schools.

Tax records show that administrative expenses accounted for 42.6 percent of the fund's expenditures in 2008-09, which non-profit monitors describe as an unusually high amount.

While putting almost $2.4 million into compensation for its own officers, staff salaries and consulting fees, the fund gave barely half that to individual schools.

Charity Navigator of Glen Rock, N.J., analyzes more than 5,500 non-profits with at least $1 million in annual revenues. "Most of them spend only about 15 percent on administration," said Sandra Miniutti, the organization's vice president for marketing.

[...]

The fund's tangible support comes from well-heeled philanthropists. It began with pledges from some big names: $4 million apiece from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Donald & Doris Fisher Fund, Robertson Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, which have made annual contributions.

Three Newark-based organizations, the Prudential Foundation, MCJ Amelior Foundation and Victoria Foundation, each agreed to put up $1 million, although none were listed on either the 2008 or 2009 reports to the IRS.

In their place, Laurene Powell Jobs contributed $882,799 over the two years. The wife of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs serves on the boards of Achieva, a study and testing company, and numerous educational organizations.

Friday, December 24, 2010

TRENTON — The hole in the state’s pension fund grew again this year, by more than $8 billion, a trend that continues after a decade of skipped payments and increased benefits.

The unfunded piece of the state’s pension liability — the estimated total amount needed to pay current and future state, county and municipal employees — grew by $8.05 billion between June 2009 and June 2010, according to a report released today by the Department of Treasury which indicted the state has a $53.9 billion unfunded promise.

Additionally, the state has a $66.8 billion unfunded promise to future and current employees for lifetime health benefits, the report found.

Gov. Chris Christie has said reforming the pension and health system is a priority for the new year and leaders in the Legislature have agreed to discuss reforms.

"If all the required contributions to the pension funds had been made over the last decade, New Jersey would still not have enough money to pay all the benefits state and local governments have promised to public employees," Treasury Spokesman Andy Pratt said in an e-mail.

[...]

This year, Christie skipped a $3.1 billion pension payment — continuing a decade of gubernatorial administrations shortchanging the system. Christie has said he will not contribute funds until the system is changed.

I've been gaining weight because I eat half a dozen doughnuts every day. But I'm not going to stop eating those doughnuts because I'm already overweight. And there's really no point in exercising if I keep eating those doughnuts.

Towns and cities in New Jersey, the second-wealthiest U.S. state, lead the nation in bond-rating downgrades this year.

From Newark to Seaside Heights, home of MTV’s reality television show “Jersey Shore,” Moody’s Investors Service cut ratings on $1.7 billion in general-obligation debt issued by at least 23 municipalities in New Jersey this year, almost twice as much as the next-highest state, New York, according to a tally by Bloomberg News. The moves follow local-aid cuts by Democratic Governor Jon Corzine and his Republican successor, Chris Christie, who has also enacted a 2 percent annual cap on property-tax increases.

“It’s a great referendum on my fiscal policies,” Christie, 48, said of the downgrades on Dec. 16. “It says that we’re getting our fiscal house in order. When other states get their houses in order, they will see the downgrades too.”

Well, I'll bet their towns just can't wait to pay more to borrow, can they?

Were I a snarky bastard, I'd point out that Mrs. Christie works on Wall Street, as does the governor's brother, Todd. Downgrading bonds leads to higher yields, and potentially bigger fees for underwriters.

Just sayin'...

As Paul Krugman reminds us today, interest rates are at historical lows. There really is no excuse for localities to pay more in interest in this climate.

In New Jersey, Christie has “cut back a lot to balance the budget, and one of the biggest items in those cutbacks is aid to municipalities,” Alan Schankel, director of fixed-income research at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, a Philadelphia-based broker, said in an interview.

“They’re downstreaming the deficit,” Schankel said. “The state starts out with a deficit; they close it and cut back in a lot of areas, but the biggest impact is on municipalities.”

So let's stop the nonsense, Star-Ledger and others, that Chris Christie is somehow "courageous" in tackling the budget. He has passed on the hard choices to the towns and cities and schools, all while giving tax gifts to the wealthiest residents of the state. Those towns and schools - many of which have been run with good fiscal oversight - are now paying the price for Christie's refusal to actually lead.

This is one of those claims made so frequently that it becomes a matter of faith. But faith doesn't rely on fact, and this one is totally untrue.

In 2008, we ranked 26th out of the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in terms of our overall tax burden -- the share of our economy we fork over to the government. The U.S.came in almost 9 percentage points below the average of the group of wealthy nations, and some 20 percentage points below highly taxed countries like Denmark.

It's amazing that this stuff has entered the mainstream and stayed there all these years. Again, a failure of the media as much as anything.

Look what tenure has become: an outdated law that makes it nearly impossible to get rid of bad teachers. We should eliminate it, and put a good system in place to evaluate teachers based on student performance. We should fire bad teachers, give help to those in the middle and pay the good ones more. It’s a reform strategy that works.

Talk about facts not in evidence. How many "bad" teachers are there who have been protected by tenure? Any research on this? Anyone? No?

Well, just say it's so: good enough for the S-L.

Michelle Rhee’s success in Washington, D.C., schools illustrates that. She negotiated a contract with teachers that killed tenure, allowing her to fire more than 200 ineffective teachers. She quadrupled spending on teacher training, used student test scores and rigorous classroom observations to rate teachers, and gave the best ones a chance to earn more money.

I'll put this simply so that even the editorial writers at the S-L can understand: there is no way we can possibly know if Rhee's scheme worked yet. That the S-L would make this claim without check into the basic facts of the matter speaks volumes as to why the newspaper industry is dying.

The same could happen here.

Yeah, and monkeys could fly out of my butt.

No matter how much money is pumped into schools, real progress isn’t likely until we turn the focus to the quality of teaching. The record on this is clear: Students who get two or three strong teachers in a row improve their performance despite their backgrounds, while those stuck with a series of weak teachers may never recover.

Never mind we have a governor who, with the cheerleading of the S-L, has waged a jihad against teachers so devastating it will take years to get bright young people interested in the field again.

Well, maybe the S-L would like to consider the possibility that before we fire all of these allegedly "bad" teachers, we should have a strong crop of replacements ready to go. Perhaps they'll ask the governor how he plans on doing this when he's already proposing to slash teacher salaries.

Tenure reform underscores the urgency of developing a reliable statewide system to judge teacher performance. Ruiz wants both principals and top-notch teachers to oversee evaluations, which is smart. Many principals have rated all their teachers just fine for years, regardless of student performance, and we’ll need to shake things up to change that. At least half of a teacher’s evaluation should be based on improvements in student test scores — in what other profession do results not matter?

In what other profession are you judged by how well OTHERS do? And you don't have the power to "fire" them and replace them?

Again: yes, fire bad teachers, please! But do not use a system that experts will tell you does not work!

The New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest union, will fight this change to the death. But our guess is that many classroom teachers would welcome it. They are professionals. It’s time we started treating them that way.

Your "guess." Because it's not like teachers vote for their union representation or anything.

Of course, maybe if the S-L worried as much about its own professionalism, it wouldn't get basic facts wrong in its editorials.

One last time: tenure is a way to protect teachers from the politicization of schools without tying up the courts. While everyone agrees that there should be a speedy, efficient process for getting bad teachers out of schools, no one should advocate getting rid of tenure without addressing this problem. The S-L does not.

One final thought on this mess:

Education is a subject I know something about. And it's clear to me that the S-L has people writing about this topic who are simply not qualified to judge the arguments put forward in the debates about schools. Nor are they able to distill the facts in a cogent way to give laypeople insight into these issues. Their writers and editors are simply over their heads.

And yet that doesn't stop them from offering these absurd views. It makes me wonder what else they don't know. Are these same editors and journalists qualified to write about global warming? Economics? Foreign policy? Taxation? The law?

I've picked on the S-L a lot today but they're hardly alone. All over the country, our national conversation has been guided by people who don't know what the hell they are talking about. We are not going to get anything done until we fix this.

In any case, Gates, Rhee, et al. constantly repeat the “fire 5-10 percent” talking point, along with the promise of miracle results, because of its potent political message: all we have to do is fire bad teachers, and everything will be fixed. They use Hanushek’s calculation to provide an empirical basis for this message. They do not, however, seem at all attuned to the fact that the proposal is less an actual policy recommendation than a stylistic illustration of the wide variation in teacher effects.

Let’s stick with meaningful conversations about how to identify, improve, and, failing that, remove ineffective teachers. Test-based measures may have a role in the evaluation of both teachers and overall school performance, but not a dominant one, and certainly not an exclusive one.

Systematically firing large numbers of teachers based solely on test scores is an incredibly crude, blunt instrument, fraught with risk. We’re better than that.

Does it bother anyone else that Gates and Rhee and Christie and all the other 'formers seem to care more about punishing "bad" teachers than upgrading the profession?

Board President Ron Tola said Wednesday that he did not participate in any of the discussions about the business administrator position, and that he abstained from voting on Tramontana's appointment because he has a daughter who works in the district.

Tola said fellow board member Eric Hamilton was also barred from participating in those discussions because he has family in the district as well.

[...]

Another element working against students, Fisher said, is what he called the patronage system, in which relatives, friends or those with political connections are selected or promoted to certain positions.

To illustrate his point, Fisher noted that school superintendent Neil Bencivengo's daughter, Cheryl Piotrowski, was promoted to the vice principal's position at Grice Middle School in August 2009, and Peter Frascella, the purchasing administrator for the district, is the son of Barbara Frascella, who is director of student services and programs for the district.

(Tramontana himself is the nephew of former Hamilton Republican Mayor Jack Rafferty.)

But Michele Rhee says, hey, trust us: there are federal laws that will protect you from this sort of stuff!

It's official: you just don't have any cred as an education reporter without the obligatory interview with St. Michele of Arc. The Star-Ledger, as part of its disaster of a report today on tenure, gives us a few minutes with the great lady:

Michelle Rhee is a national hero for education reformers. While serving as superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C., she negotiated a groundbreaking teachers contract that allowed for teachers to be fired based on poor job performance. The contract rid the system of tenure protections in exchange for giving teachers the chance to earn more money and performance bonuses.

Rhee quadrupled spending on teacher professional development, fired more than 200 instructors who didn’t measure up and told 700 others they’d have to improve within a year or leave — and student test scores rose.

OK, let's stop right there and see if we can get past Rhee's giant cape emblazoned with an "S" to really look at her career in Washington.

(What good is having your own blog if you can't change metaphors at will?)

Rhee was hired in June of 2007 by then-Mayor Adrian Fenty to run the DC schools. She resigned in October of 2010. That's a little more than three years. Is anyone going to seriously tell me that a rise in student test scores can be directly attributed to Rhee's policies over the three years she was in the job?

Further: the claim here is that Rhee can speak to tenure reform because she implemented it in DC to excellent results. But she didn't implement a policy under a new teacher contract until 2010. She didn't fire any teachers for poor performance until 2010!

How in the hell can the S-L claim that her tenure policies are responsible for rising test scores when we don't even know what the results of those policies are?!?

This is what I'm talking about when I say the media just doesn't care about education. It took me all of 10 minutes to Google this stuff. Couldn't Julie O'Connor - PROFESSIONAL reporter - be bothered to do the same?

Well, why bother; I guess you can never doubt the claims of a saint:

Since leaving the D.C. post in October, she’s started a national advocacy group called StudentsFirst, with the goal of raising $1 billion and rallying 1 million members around a stated mission of putting kids’ needs before those of adult special interests.

Q. You changed tenure rules in your district through negotiations with the teachers union. In New Jersey, legislators are considering a new bill to overhaul tenure statewide. What’s the best way to go about reforming tenure?

A. I don’t think we need to reform tenure. I don’t think there is a need for tenure. Teachers need to understand they are not going to be discriminated against. If they feel they’ve been unfairly terminated, they need to have a process by which they can address that issue. School districts need to ensure firings are not happening in an unfair manner. But all of those things can happen without tenure being in place.
Part of the reason we started StudentsFirst is to always look at policies from a kid-centric point of view. If there is any protection in public education, it should be for the children, not for the adults.

I so despise this false choice that Rhee and Christie and all the 'formers keep putting up: the kids come first, not the teachers!

And yet you people go on and on about how important the teachers are to student achievement. If you really cared about the kids, you'd be doing everything in your power to protect teachers from political interference, and you'd be banging the tub long and hard for better teacher pay and working conditions.

Instead, you tell teachers to basically "trust me" because you would NEVER allow them to be fired unfairly. As Mary Poppins said, that's a pie crust promise: easily made, easily broken. Teachers need more than Michele Rhee's word that they will have protection from political interference and cronyism on the job. If you really want to "put kids first," you'd insist on it.

Q. How could teachers have a process to protect them against unfair firings without tenure being in place?

A. Well, first, there are federal protections in place against discriminatory firings. In D.C., we also created an “appeals process” in which teachers who felt that they’d been wrongfully terminated could file an appeal. We appointed a three-person committee to review these cases and make recommendations to me to overturn or sustain the original decision.

"Recommendations to me..." In other words: trust me. Sorry, but no. You, St. Michele, are in fact the poster-girl for why teachers need tenure. You allied yourself with Fenty in a way that was completely political and unprofessional. You showed quite clearly that you could not be trusted to "put the kids first." No teacher in their right mind would ever believe that you were capable of remaining unbiased in a tenure hearing.

You don’t just want this to be about the lowest-performing teachers. There are hundreds of teachers in New Jersey who are doing an amazing job every day, and those people should be valued as professionals for producing great results. What people often don’t understand is that teachers’ union contracts also don’t let us pay our best teachers more for the work they’re doing. That needs to change.

I ask again: you say you want a great teacher for every kid. You want to pay great teachers more. Are you or are you not advocating raising the entire payroll for the teacher corps?

Q. Once tenure is no longer a “lifetime job,” how do you ensure you’re fairly identifying and firing the worst teachers and principals?

A. That goes back to the evaluations. I think it’s incredibly important to make sure student achievement levels are a primary factor you’re looking at in teacher evaluations. I also don’t think it’s advisable to use test scores and test scores only. We based 50 percent of our teacher evaluations on student achievement gains.

Each teacher was also evaluated in five classroom observations per year, which were unannounced. Some were done by the school administrator, but a number were also completed by peers of the teachers, “master educators” who were expert in their grade levels and subject areas.

Again: how are you going to pay for this? Who's coming up with the dough for five evaluations a year? And how high-quality of an observation could a teacher expect?

They are scored against a "teaching and learning framework" with 22 different measures in nine categories. Among the criteria are classroom presence, time management, clarity in presenting the objectives of a lesson and ensuring that students across all levels of learning ability understand the material.

A number of teachers never got the full five evaluations, apparently because a number of master teachers hired to do the jobs quit, according to sources in the school system.

But even if they all were, let’s look closely at this: In 30 minutes, a teacher is supposed to demonstrate all 22 different teaching elements. What teacher demonstrates 22 teaching elements -- some of which are not particularly related -- in 30 minutes? Suppose a teacher takes 30 minutes to introduce new material and doesn’t have time to show. ... Oh well. Bad evaluation. [Emphasis mine]

Some $2 billion has been spent on Xanadu and much of it has gone to contractors, tradesmen and teams of politically connected professionals.

But where did all that money come from?

The answer, to a large degree, is pension funds for police, firefighters and other public employees around the country.

Nine public pension systems from Alaska to Texas to New York poured nearly $1 billion into two private-equity funds that include Xanadu among their investments, according to pension records reviewed by The Record. Those pensions have seen their collective investments in these funds shrink to about $360 million, a decline of about 60 percent, according to the pensions' records spanning the last year.

States and towns use regressive taxes. When they don't have enough money to pay for things like pensions, they could make their taxes more progressive.

Instead, they play games and get burned. This is borne from the same attitude that gave us a 20-year "pension holiday" in NJ.

Rather than getting money from the very wealthiest - who are taking a bigger piece of the pie than at any time in the last century - politicians fund ponzi schemes that ultimately impoverish public workers and middle class taxpayers. The fees for these schemes go right to the same wealthiest few who continue to avoid paying their fair share in taxes; it's all part of the plan.

This is why Christie will never, ever move public workers to "defined contribution" plans: there's just too much money for Wall Street to make this way. God forbid teachers take their own money and put it into transparent, reasonably-priced investments, either through 403(b)s or truly transparent and well-managed pension funds.

Christie's solution remains having teachers pour more and more money into a funnel that may as well end directly in TriBeCa. We'll continue to capitalize his friends' wacky adventures, and take the blame from the taxpayers when their property taxes soar once again.

By the way - it is a very legitimate question to ask why the public employee unions weren't on top of this.

New Jersey’s policies for exiting ineffective teachers are better than most states but still leave room for improvement. Although the state requires three annual evaluations of new teachers, with the first occurring in the first half of the school year, no policy has been articulated regarding teachers who receive unsatisfactory evaluations. Commendably, the state also requires that all teachers pass all required subject-matter tests as a condition of initial licensure. (p.40)

New Jersey commendably requires that all teachers pass all required subject-matter tests as a condition of initial licensure. However, the state fails to articulate a policy regarding teachers who receive unsatisfactory evaluations. Regrettably, New Jersey does not address the appeal process for tenured teachers who are terminated for poor performance, and it fails to distinguish due process rights for teachers dismissed for ineffective performance from those facing license revocation for dereliction of duty or felony and/or morality violations. (p.77)

Now, were I a snarky bastard, I'd point out that the only change in NJ's educational policy between the publication of the 2008 and 2009 reports was the election of Chris Christie. But, hey, NCTQ is "non-partisan" - I'm sure they'd NEVER politicize their reports...

I'll just leave you to conjecture for yourself why NJ would get such a different grade with no accompanying changes in policies.

I'll also leave you to ponder the irony that these are the people who insist that results on tests are an effective way to judge teacher quality, because testing instruments are SO reliable...